The Founding and its Cultural Mormon Enemies
Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2012 5:04 pm
http://joannabrookswatch.wordpress.com/ ... n-enemies/
In the Doctrine and Covenants, a book of scripture Latter-day Saints understand to be the direct word of the Lord to the Saints in modern times at the time of the organization and development of the Church in the last dispensation (the dispensation of the fullness of times), there are several clear statements made upon the Constitution of the United States and its relation, as a political document, to the gospel and its truths as related to the mortal human condition. Section 101 tells us that the constitution was something which the Lord “suffered to be established”and that it “should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh, according to just and holy principles.” Each individual, under such a constitution, is both protected by it, in the “free exercise of conscience, the right and control of property, and the protection of life (D&C 134:2) and responsible to it in that “every man may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto him, that every man may be accountable for his own sins in the day of judgment.”
It was for this purpose, the Lord says, that he “established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose…” Further, the verities of the Constitution are not simply a sociocultural construction of a particular people at a particular time under particular circumstances (as Marxists would have it, or as Charles Beard understood the founding as of primarily class origins grounded in narrow economic interest), but eternal principles relevant to the mortal probation. This “law of the land,” the Lord tells us through the principle of revelation (as accepted by faithful Latter-day Saints), “which is constitutional” (a stable, written, definitive document underlying the structure and function of the state and its relation to its citizens) and which – and this is a caveat we return to again in section 134 – “supporting that principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges,” is, the Saviour tells us, “justifiable before me.”
The Master also states clearly that “whatsoever is more or less than this, cometh of evil.” The statements of numerous General Authorities of the Church, from the 19th century to the present moment, could be brought to the table as confirmation and testimony of the unique place this extraordinary and exceptional document – extraordinary and exceptional across the entire panorama of human political and cultural history – has in the doctrine and philosophy of the restored Church of Jesus Christ, and we will, doubtless, have cause to reacquaint ourselves with some of those statements and principles in the future.
The Left, which came into being bearing many of its salient modern attributes and key ideas at about the same time, represents the antithesis of the principles and core ideas of the Founding, as well as the “classical liberal” (or just “liberal” as it is still understood in Europe) concepts that grounded the rise and spread of the philosophy of liberty, unalienable rights, and the essential dignity and equality of humankind, and which, carrying ideas and ideals from both its Enlightenment and Judeo-Christian antecedents, eventually led to a moral revolt in the West against slavery and its eventually abandonment, as well as the establishment of America and a body of other English-speaking nations, founded in these principles, of which America saw the most extensive flowering and maturing over time.
Leftism, arising out of Franco-Germanic philosophical soil and representing, in a sense, what one might call the “dark side” of the Enlightenment, that perceives “freedom” and the fundamental nature of the human condition in radically different terms (as well as the nature of the universe itself), has been a keen and aggressive competitor with the classic liberal (or in modern American terms, “conservative” and/or “libertarian” across a number of dimensions) perception of things for the hearts and minds of God’s children. From the French Revolution through Marx, Cultural Marxism, the New Left, and the postmodern philosophical and linguistic assault on western civilization, the “Left” has been an always present – and overwhelmingly successful, from the early 20th century onward – opponent of the classical liberal tradition, as well as the key civilizational institutions underlying a free, self-governing, civil social order – the family, marriage, religion, normative Judeo-Christian sexual norms, private property rights, economic liberty, and unalienable individual rights (as well as individualism per se – the idea that individual human beings are sovereign over their own lives, bodies, time, talent, and property, and that these core aspects of the human condition should not be subject to the preemptive claims of others or of the state through the use of coercive force, nor should the individual be denied the full use of his faculties, abilities, and aptitudes by the state or democratic majorities through the state, for “collective” purposes (the “common good”) determined by third parties).
The major rise and subversion of the constitution and it principles began in the “progressive era” of the 1920s and 1930s (and most especially, the 30s), gained substantial ground, slowed and became much less influential for about a quarter century after the end of WWII, and then came aggressively and pervasively back to life in the late sixties, taking control of most of the major institutions of society and substantially altering to cultural, intellectual, and ethical landscape of America and the West.
In this situation, leftists have always had a love/hate relationship with the Constitution. They have attempted to embrace it through the alteration of the meaning of language (as they cannot embrace its “original intent”) and at other times to destroy it piecemeal through reinterpretation or, when it a more open and aggressive mood, openly denounce it as an impediment to “social justice.” Latter-day-Saints are bound, in a doctrinal/theological sense, to support, defend, and revere the principles of the Constitution as sacred and as of more than a sociological artifact. What of LDS who find themselves on the contemporary Left, however, and thereby find themselves opposed, philosophically, to much of what the constitution claims about the nature and proper function of the state, and the limits of government power? And what of the deeper fountains of leftist philosophy – its German, continental, and French roots in utopian idealism, egalitarian collectivism, and rationalistic, secularist relativism and nihilism?
Its interesting here to look at an interview between radical feminist and ethnic literature scholar Joanna Brooks with Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Tocqueville Professor of Religion and Public Life at Notre Dame University in Religion Dispatches, an leftist online magazine deeply critical of modern conservatism and its core principles as grounded in the very classical liberal concepts that the Left has been working to remove from human consciousness and acceptance for so long. This is all the more interesting when one reflects on the “Mormon” self-description Brooks is intent on using to describe herself (and be a “voice” of "Mormon" culture to the contemporary world) Just a few observations and queries for the road:
Its interesting here the Brooks uses the term “assume” to designate what is, ostensibly, an easily ascertained historical confluence between the ideas of the Founders and their continuation in modern times among the heirs of that tradition, modern conservatism and, to a somewhat more restricted degree, libertarianism. The Left has, in actuality, no particular connection to the Founding except in two ways, the first being that both were born, initially, from the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and the second being its historic hostility to the particular direction one school of that Enlightenment took in developing its ideas, which was that toward what came to be known as classical “liberalism.”
“Who thinks more like the Founders?” she asks. Muñoz answers, “it is far too simple to suggest that modern conservatism and the founding fathers go hand-in-hand.” Fair enough, as this is not the 18th century, and certain cultural differences would intrude upon a simple idea for idea connection. He then mentions, correctly, a major area of difference, in that “insofar as modern liberalism embraces the idea of the necessary and inevitable progress of history, it breaks from the moral horizon of the founders.
Brooks is aware of this salient aspect of the intellectual pedigree of the Left, and responds that “That’s the Hegelian view of history. And Hegel was born too late for the founders. “On any particular issue,” Muñoz says, the Founders agreed as to broad generalities, but displayed various interpretations of the fundamental principles involved. “Modern conservatism and modern liberalism are complicated,” he says, and to the extent that either the Left or modern conservatism ascribed standards of ethical and moral verity to nature and nature’s God (I core idea underlying the concept of natural rights), “they lie in agreement with the founders’ world view.”
The difficulty one encounteres here is, it must be admitted, quite severe, as one must now ask the question of exactly where the Left seeks standards, conditions, and boundaries of morality and ethical conceptualizations of the nature of human relations within natural rights theory? Where is the implied overlap between the Left and contemporary classic liberalism? Well, the answer, of course, nowhere, as the concept of natural rights, just as of “unalienable” individual rights, is not found within the philosophical framework of the historic Left, nor has been since the French Revolution.
The Left long ago became adept at co-opting the language of classical liberalism as a tool, or weapon, in its arsenal of weapons of cultural and political struggle, and would, yes, feign claim the Founders as their true progenitors. Has there ever been a poor, benighted, totalitarian police state, grounded in the ideology and vision of the Left, that was not designated in its official national name as a “democratic republic” or a peoples’ republic? Weren’t all the peoples of the socialist world of the 20th century, held as slaves by their ruling classes, without even the rudiments of the civil rights and unalienable human liberties, as understood in the classical liberal tradition, taken for granted in America and the West, in some sense “liberated” peoples?
The Hegelian concept of history is not a concept of freedom, liberty, or human self-determination grounded in free will and the unalienable rights of the individual, but of the human subject as an epiphenomena of inexorable historical forces working out their inherent aims and goals through human historical experience, as the World Spirit seeks to actualize itself through history, of which the individual human being is but a derivative particle within a vast, organic whole having a overarching will and trajectory of its own.
The intellectual pedigree of the Left: the dialectic historical and metaphysical determinism of Hegal, the nihilism of Nietzsche, the reductionist, positivist rationalism of Comte, the various egalitarian collectivisms of Rousseau, Saint Simon, Marx, and other utopian socialists, and the leftist totalitarian vision of the human subject as a moral and ideological abstraction in a vast, organic hive in which the entirety of the human condition is reduced to material, intellectual, and social uniformity while free will is denied in the name of freedom; this is the heritage, not of the Founders and their contemporary descendents and defenders, but of a century-long cultural war and “long march” through the institutions who’s core purpose is to undo and delegitimize everything the Founders believed and everything their philosophy implies and states as fundamental propositions about the human condition. “So who better channels the founders?” Brooks asks? Both Brooks and Muñoz leave the question essentially unanswered, and in a confused and fragmented state. But Brooks has an intimation of an answer, the answer given by generations of leftists for whom there are no, and cannot be, if the “better world” they see in their gnostic dreams is to become a living reality, eternal verities or “permanent things” which lie beyond the realm of “change” or “fundamental transformation” through politics and rituals of ideological purification.
“…the founders” she tells us, “were men of their times, with perspectives informed by eighteenth century philosophy, not to be confused with or neatly assimilated to 21st century political partisanship.”
Is Brooks only pretending not to understand that the issues that face America (and the West) now, are not, strictly speaking, issues of “political partisanship.” but of whether liberal democracy and limited, representative government will continue at all into the next and future generations, and whether their will be a “civil” society at all, in any tolerable sense of the term, for our children and grandchildren to inherit?
Or will Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Shelly, de Beauvoir, and their heirs, the post-sixties radical feminists and the postmodernists, of whom Nietzsche is the fountainhead, divide the spoils of cultural conquest among themselves in the end?
The scriptures and teachings of the modern oracles say otherwise. What, however, to cultural Mormons see in these?
In the Doctrine and Covenants, a book of scripture Latter-day Saints understand to be the direct word of the Lord to the Saints in modern times at the time of the organization and development of the Church in the last dispensation (the dispensation of the fullness of times), there are several clear statements made upon the Constitution of the United States and its relation, as a political document, to the gospel and its truths as related to the mortal human condition. Section 101 tells us that the constitution was something which the Lord “suffered to be established”and that it “should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh, according to just and holy principles.” Each individual, under such a constitution, is both protected by it, in the “free exercise of conscience, the right and control of property, and the protection of life (D&C 134:2) and responsible to it in that “every man may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto him, that every man may be accountable for his own sins in the day of judgment.”
It was for this purpose, the Lord says, that he “established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose…” Further, the verities of the Constitution are not simply a sociocultural construction of a particular people at a particular time under particular circumstances (as Marxists would have it, or as Charles Beard understood the founding as of primarily class origins grounded in narrow economic interest), but eternal principles relevant to the mortal probation. This “law of the land,” the Lord tells us through the principle of revelation (as accepted by faithful Latter-day Saints), “which is constitutional” (a stable, written, definitive document underlying the structure and function of the state and its relation to its citizens) and which – and this is a caveat we return to again in section 134 – “supporting that principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges,” is, the Saviour tells us, “justifiable before me.”
The Master also states clearly that “whatsoever is more or less than this, cometh of evil.” The statements of numerous General Authorities of the Church, from the 19th century to the present moment, could be brought to the table as confirmation and testimony of the unique place this extraordinary and exceptional document – extraordinary and exceptional across the entire panorama of human political and cultural history – has in the doctrine and philosophy of the restored Church of Jesus Christ, and we will, doubtless, have cause to reacquaint ourselves with some of those statements and principles in the future.
The Left, which came into being bearing many of its salient modern attributes and key ideas at about the same time, represents the antithesis of the principles and core ideas of the Founding, as well as the “classical liberal” (or just “liberal” as it is still understood in Europe) concepts that grounded the rise and spread of the philosophy of liberty, unalienable rights, and the essential dignity and equality of humankind, and which, carrying ideas and ideals from both its Enlightenment and Judeo-Christian antecedents, eventually led to a moral revolt in the West against slavery and its eventually abandonment, as well as the establishment of America and a body of other English-speaking nations, founded in these principles, of which America saw the most extensive flowering and maturing over time.
Leftism, arising out of Franco-Germanic philosophical soil and representing, in a sense, what one might call the “dark side” of the Enlightenment, that perceives “freedom” and the fundamental nature of the human condition in radically different terms (as well as the nature of the universe itself), has been a keen and aggressive competitor with the classic liberal (or in modern American terms, “conservative” and/or “libertarian” across a number of dimensions) perception of things for the hearts and minds of God’s children. From the French Revolution through Marx, Cultural Marxism, the New Left, and the postmodern philosophical and linguistic assault on western civilization, the “Left” has been an always present – and overwhelmingly successful, from the early 20th century onward – opponent of the classical liberal tradition, as well as the key civilizational institutions underlying a free, self-governing, civil social order – the family, marriage, religion, normative Judeo-Christian sexual norms, private property rights, economic liberty, and unalienable individual rights (as well as individualism per se – the idea that individual human beings are sovereign over their own lives, bodies, time, talent, and property, and that these core aspects of the human condition should not be subject to the preemptive claims of others or of the state through the use of coercive force, nor should the individual be denied the full use of his faculties, abilities, and aptitudes by the state or democratic majorities through the state, for “collective” purposes (the “common good”) determined by third parties).
The major rise and subversion of the constitution and it principles began in the “progressive era” of the 1920s and 1930s (and most especially, the 30s), gained substantial ground, slowed and became much less influential for about a quarter century after the end of WWII, and then came aggressively and pervasively back to life in the late sixties, taking control of most of the major institutions of society and substantially altering to cultural, intellectual, and ethical landscape of America and the West.
In this situation, leftists have always had a love/hate relationship with the Constitution. They have attempted to embrace it through the alteration of the meaning of language (as they cannot embrace its “original intent”) and at other times to destroy it piecemeal through reinterpretation or, when it a more open and aggressive mood, openly denounce it as an impediment to “social justice.” Latter-day-Saints are bound, in a doctrinal/theological sense, to support, defend, and revere the principles of the Constitution as sacred and as of more than a sociological artifact. What of LDS who find themselves on the contemporary Left, however, and thereby find themselves opposed, philosophically, to much of what the constitution claims about the nature and proper function of the state, and the limits of government power? And what of the deeper fountains of leftist philosophy – its German, continental, and French roots in utopian idealism, egalitarian collectivism, and rationalistic, secularist relativism and nihilism?
Its interesting here to look at an interview between radical feminist and ethnic literature scholar Joanna Brooks with Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Tocqueville Professor of Religion and Public Life at Notre Dame University in Religion Dispatches, an leftist online magazine deeply critical of modern conservatism and its core principles as grounded in the very classical liberal concepts that the Left has been working to remove from human consciousness and acceptance for so long. This is all the more interesting when one reflects on the “Mormon” self-description Brooks is intent on using to describe herself (and be a “voice” of "Mormon" culture to the contemporary world) Just a few observations and queries for the road:
Its interesting here the Brooks uses the term “assume” to designate what is, ostensibly, an easily ascertained historical confluence between the ideas of the Founders and their continuation in modern times among the heirs of that tradition, modern conservatism and, to a somewhat more restricted degree, libertarianism. The Left has, in actuality, no particular connection to the Founding except in two ways, the first being that both were born, initially, from the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and the second being its historic hostility to the particular direction one school of that Enlightenment took in developing its ideas, which was that toward what came to be known as classical “liberalism.”
“Who thinks more like the Founders?” she asks. Muñoz answers, “it is far too simple to suggest that modern conservatism and the founding fathers go hand-in-hand.” Fair enough, as this is not the 18th century, and certain cultural differences would intrude upon a simple idea for idea connection. He then mentions, correctly, a major area of difference, in that “insofar as modern liberalism embraces the idea of the necessary and inevitable progress of history, it breaks from the moral horizon of the founders.
Brooks is aware of this salient aspect of the intellectual pedigree of the Left, and responds that “That’s the Hegelian view of history. And Hegel was born too late for the founders. “On any particular issue,” Muñoz says, the Founders agreed as to broad generalities, but displayed various interpretations of the fundamental principles involved. “Modern conservatism and modern liberalism are complicated,” he says, and to the extent that either the Left or modern conservatism ascribed standards of ethical and moral verity to nature and nature’s God (I core idea underlying the concept of natural rights), “they lie in agreement with the founders’ world view.”
The difficulty one encounteres here is, it must be admitted, quite severe, as one must now ask the question of exactly where the Left seeks standards, conditions, and boundaries of morality and ethical conceptualizations of the nature of human relations within natural rights theory? Where is the implied overlap between the Left and contemporary classic liberalism? Well, the answer, of course, nowhere, as the concept of natural rights, just as of “unalienable” individual rights, is not found within the philosophical framework of the historic Left, nor has been since the French Revolution.
The Left long ago became adept at co-opting the language of classical liberalism as a tool, or weapon, in its arsenal of weapons of cultural and political struggle, and would, yes, feign claim the Founders as their true progenitors. Has there ever been a poor, benighted, totalitarian police state, grounded in the ideology and vision of the Left, that was not designated in its official national name as a “democratic republic” or a peoples’ republic? Weren’t all the peoples of the socialist world of the 20th century, held as slaves by their ruling classes, without even the rudiments of the civil rights and unalienable human liberties, as understood in the classical liberal tradition, taken for granted in America and the West, in some sense “liberated” peoples?
The Hegelian concept of history is not a concept of freedom, liberty, or human self-determination grounded in free will and the unalienable rights of the individual, but of the human subject as an epiphenomena of inexorable historical forces working out their inherent aims and goals through human historical experience, as the World Spirit seeks to actualize itself through history, of which the individual human being is but a derivative particle within a vast, organic whole having a overarching will and trajectory of its own.
The intellectual pedigree of the Left: the dialectic historical and metaphysical determinism of Hegal, the nihilism of Nietzsche, the reductionist, positivist rationalism of Comte, the various egalitarian collectivisms of Rousseau, Saint Simon, Marx, and other utopian socialists, and the leftist totalitarian vision of the human subject as a moral and ideological abstraction in a vast, organic hive in which the entirety of the human condition is reduced to material, intellectual, and social uniformity while free will is denied in the name of freedom; this is the heritage, not of the Founders and their contemporary descendents and defenders, but of a century-long cultural war and “long march” through the institutions who’s core purpose is to undo and delegitimize everything the Founders believed and everything their philosophy implies and states as fundamental propositions about the human condition. “So who better channels the founders?” Brooks asks? Both Brooks and Muñoz leave the question essentially unanswered, and in a confused and fragmented state. But Brooks has an intimation of an answer, the answer given by generations of leftists for whom there are no, and cannot be, if the “better world” they see in their gnostic dreams is to become a living reality, eternal verities or “permanent things” which lie beyond the realm of “change” or “fundamental transformation” through politics and rituals of ideological purification.
“…the founders” she tells us, “were men of their times, with perspectives informed by eighteenth century philosophy, not to be confused with or neatly assimilated to 21st century political partisanship.”
Is Brooks only pretending not to understand that the issues that face America (and the West) now, are not, strictly speaking, issues of “political partisanship.” but of whether liberal democracy and limited, representative government will continue at all into the next and future generations, and whether their will be a “civil” society at all, in any tolerable sense of the term, for our children and grandchildren to inherit?
Or will Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Shelly, de Beauvoir, and their heirs, the post-sixties radical feminists and the postmodernists, of whom Nietzsche is the fountainhead, divide the spoils of cultural conquest among themselves in the end?
The scriptures and teachings of the modern oracles say otherwise. What, however, to cultural Mormons see in these?